Friday, August 10, 2018

The dogs are whistling...

Zionist and Crusader- two descriptions that can be deployed in many contexts in polite anglophile conversation without the need for summoning a disciplinary committee immediately afterward. But when Osama Bin Laden spoke of ‘the Zionist-Crusader alliance', something else was going on. Both appellations had acquired a slightly kooky, reality-detached emphasis. Fanatics and other kinds of ideologues do this - they kidnap epithets and zap them with their wacky rays before releasing them back into the discourse, now bearing secret-handshakey added meanings. (Viz ‘Neoliberal’, as used by many on the Left today.) Now, while to almost all outside the Al Qaeda filter bubble it’s quite apparent that George W Bush was not literally a Frankish knight with a red cross emblazoned on his shield, many on the Corbynite Left seem unable or unwilling to comprehend that most Jews are not what the bloodthirsty bearded one actually meant by ‘Zionist’ either. And they habitually deflect criticism by hiding behind the fact that it surely remains possible to use the term 'Zionist' in an un-loaded fashion. Something similar is going on with Boris and his niqab letter boxes. It strikes me as a more sophisticated version of the Trump Twitter idiom - a set of words designed to sit just on the edge of what liberal sentiment can currently tolerate, whilst bearing a hidden payload of meanings (complete with virtual high fives) for the co-religionists on the other side of that line. I am usually solidly in favour of free speech, but there can be little doubt that these are techniques that are being used to game our system of liberal democracy